Woman donates kidney then marries transplant recipient four years later

Chelsea Clair and Kyle Froelich walk down the aisle four years after they first met (Picture: AP)

A young man who was offered a kidney – to replace his ailing ones – by a girl he’d only just met has married her four years later.

Chelsea Clair and Kyle Froelich met in 2009 at a car show when they were 22 and 19 years old, respectively.

After a lengthy battle trying to find suitable matches, Kyle had been told by doctors not to keep up his hopes of finding a donor to replace his struggling kidneys.

However, Chelsea offered hers to the teen on the day they met in Indiana, US.

‘We ended up being almost a perfect match,’ she said.

Chelsea and Kyle’s kidneys were a perfect match (Picture: AP)

As serendipity would have it, Kyle’s numerous mismatches paled into obscurity when the two underwent surgery and she successfully donated one of her kidneys one year later.

Ms Clair, whose father died while needing a bone marrow transplant that he never received, was told by her family: ‘Chelsea, you can’t just go to Wal-Mart and buy a kidney,’ the Indianapolis Star reports.

Her mother had apparently watched a kidney transplant online and tried to curtail her daughter’s insistence.

However, the woman was determined and in the end the kidney worked straight away.

Accompanying each other to hospital appointments they began to fall in love.

‘There’s a bond that no one else, unless they’ve done it, can know,’ said Mr Froelich, now 23.

‘She’s my best friend.’

They married on October 12 and replaced ‘in sickness and in health’ with ‘I offer you my hand, my heart and my soul, as I know they will be safe with you’.